Todd Lambrix - Teaching and Student Work
A Diverse Approach
Sculpture and the body are inherently related. I routinely teach concepts around the body, image, transformation and the ways materials play a role. A variety of techniques and concepts from across genres are explored and considered. Often times students will incorporate performance or video as an accompaniment to the work. I stress the importance of process over outcome in my teaching as a way to connect the student to how we learn.
Collaborative Thinking
The inflatables project happens in class as an exercise with a team. Students are thrust into a project with a deadline after a lecture on sustainable, portable structures. Working together they have to house the class with limited materials and time. This is not an exercise in beauty or craft but one of conceptualization and realization as a group effort. We then spend time considering the formal qualities and how the techniques learned can extend into future works for them.
Time Composition and Exploring Sound
In this project, students worked in 3 different realms of thought to arrive at a sound composition. Individually, they explored sound through the creation of experimental instruments. The class was broken into 3 teams that dealt with a final composition, a final documentation and a final catalogue. A guest speaker, Ken Butler who is a well known maker of experimental instruments is brought in to show examples and kick off this intense project.
Artist and Musician Ken Butler joins the class as a guest lecturer to kick off the assignment
Material Specialization:
I have extensive knowledge in casting as well as the safe handling of resins and compounds. This opens up some exciting doors for students to realize their ideas. In these examples, students were learning how to make animatronic puppets for stop motion animations. Latex, silicone, mold making, armatures and a host of other fun materials and techniques were incorporated.
Click above for projects in this class
Time is a first year core course that focuses on the idea that time is a malleable, manmade construct and its use in art and design can change the way we perceive the world. Embodied, one of the three inflections through which the Time course is taught, focuses on the body and movement, performance, physical limitation and social perceptions.
Materials as Impetus
I teach my students through projects, iteration. and how we learn through failure. Neuroscientist Frank Wilson’s research around the hand as an activator of the idea centers in our brains turns the tables on creative thinking starting with the idea. My students work through conceptualization with an iterative practice. We look at process and map the course we took towards a finalized, content rich work of art.
